162 Summit Elgin, IL

After the crash President Obama initiated what he called the National Stabilization Program (NSP). It gave money to cities to buy and rehabilitate foreclosed problem properties that were having such a negative impact on our neighborhoods. The City of Elgin was awarded over two million dollars. I was lucky enough to be on the committee that looked at houses for sale in Elgin to pick the ones most in need of help. With the Federal money the city bought eight or ten houses, rehabbed four themselves and gave the rest to Habitat for Humanity to rehab. They put out a request for proposals to contractors to bid on the city owned properties. One of the houses was awarded to Carlos Rivera at Homework Construction an Elgin firm and the other three were given to a contractor from St. Charles. I have a great relationship with Carlos so I was hired to recreate a lot of the missing details at 162 Summit. Here is how it looked when the city purchased it for $56,430 in 2010. It had wide exposure aluminum siding on it and was two units.

I exactly duplicated hundreds of feet of missing interior trim, recreated fancy window hoods on the exterior and repaired the broken gable ornaments.

When a past owner put aluminum siding on the house he had to take all of the window trim off to make a flat surface to easily reside. The marks onthe house were used to recreate the window hoods.

Here is a mockup of a window hood I made to get approval from the city and their architect.

Here are finished window hoods:

The original side porch post and balustrade had been replaced with wrought iron but no pictures of the original porch were available.

Luckily the gable ornaments, front porch canopy and their fancy brackets remained. The gable ornaments needed extensive repairs. Here they are after repairs were made. The left half is new as is the turned pendant.

This was made new to duplicate the original exactly.

An architect was hired to design the new porch. I suggested a design that I thought would be appropriate. I made full scale mockups of everything to show the city and architect. I was allowed to carry out my designs.

I put the mockup on the house to check for scale and to get the okay from the city and architect. The two window hoods in the picture are new.

The spindle design was taken from the spindle on the canopy brackets as seen below.

Here is the finished bracket. Notice the classic symbolism of the crescent moon and star.

Of the design Wikipedia says, “Today, the crescent moon and star symbol is universally recognized as a symbol of Islam, and for that reason, it appears on the flag of many countries where Islam is a state religion or which has a largely Muslim population. Currently 8 countries have this symbol on their national flags, and all of them are